Presidential hopeful George W. Bush
has seen the enemy -- and it isn't Al
Gore.

Bush has asked the Federal Election
Commission to crack down on a
satirical Web site created by Zack
Exley, a self-described "Christian who
loathes hypocrisy," and the
anti-establishment Web design group
RTMark.

In a letter of complaint sent to the
commission earlier this month, Bush's
lawyers claimed the site is not about
humor, but represents a "political
committee" with an agenda to politically
assassinate the Republican candidate.

Exley's site parodies Bush's official
campaign page. The page features
flag-waving colors and grinning
portraits of Bush, along with Amnesty
2000, a satirical manifesto. That
document features Bush, presently the
governor of Texas, describing a plan to
pardon people convicted of cocaine
possession.

The document refers to Bush's refusal
to directly answer the question of
whether he himself ever used cocaine in
his youth.

"Bush won't deny he has used cocaine,
yet hundreds of thousands of people
are serving very long sentences for
equivalent ... crimes," said Exley, in a
statement issued Thursday.

"Do we want our children to learn that
crime is only a crime if you don't have
power?"

Meanwhile, the Bush camp is fighting
back. Hard.

A week after Exley's site went up on 5
April, the Bush campaign issued a
cease-and-desist letter claiming the
site violated copyright laws. Then they
scrambled to register 60 more domain
names, like bushbites.com and
bushsux.org, to add to their previous
collection of at least a couple hundred
names that they had snapped up a
year ago.

The latest salvo against the rogue site
came in a 3 May letter to the Federal
Elections Commission. The note
claimed that the RTMark site was not
satire, but amounted to a political
committee, and as such required
registration and regulation with the
FEC.

"Humor is fine, but this isn't humor.
It's a political campaign against George
W. Bush," said campaign spokesman
Dave Beckwith.

Exley, a Boston computer consultant,
doesn't exactly disagree.

"It's parody and political satire," he
said. "A big function of political satire
has always been education. We're
going to make it a great, intelligent
satire focusing on the contradictions
inherent in our whole political system."

Meanwhile, Exley has not been averse
to trying to make some money off the
situation. According to Beckwith,
Exley's asking price was US$350,000
for gwbush.com.